Truth or Dare
by BeshterAngelus
Summary: One night, a stake out, and two bored agents. What confessions come out over a small game of truth or dare?


Character: Dana Scully

Fandom: The X-files

Rating: R

Word Count: 2670

Prompt: Theme Prompt: Stupidest moment of your youth...

Setting: Vaguely sixth season, under AD Kersh, and on an inane stake out...

AN: This is a free standing story from my "Seasons" series. It was drabble I wrote early on for Scully and Mulder, and I ran across it and loved it enough to want to post it separately. A lot of things I've tweaked slightly in my "Seasons" stories, but its fun all the same.

* * *

"Truth or dare?"

"Mulder, it's a stake out, not a sleep over," Scully yawned grumpily into the dark, annoyed that the clock read 3 AM, and there was no sign of movement from the house they sat in front of. The late night talk shows had gotten old hours before, and she refused to allow Mulder to turn on Art Bell. Having to deal with one crank and his government conspiracies was enough.

"I know it's a stake out, but humor me."

"I'm not taking a dare from you."

"Come on, Scully, it's not like I'll make you run around the car topless," Mulder looked petulant beside her, as he cracked a sunflower seed between his teeth, his eyes glittering in the dark. "Of course, if you wanted to run around topless…"

Her look across at him in the dimness of the car was all the response she needed. He shrugged and returned to staring at the house across the street.

"What if I said truth," Scully finally gave in, sheer boredom peeking her curiosity more than anything.

"Well then, you have to tell me all of your darkest secrets, whatever I ask," his voice was deep and suggestive in the shadows, and she felt herself brain slightly revolt at the idea.

"How do you know I'm not going to just make it up and lie to you?"

"I'm a criminal profiler, Scully, I'm paid the big bucks to see through people's bull shit."

"You aren't paid the big bucks for that anymore, you're forced to watch drug dealers at ungodly hours of the morning."

"Touché, Scully, so tell me, who was the first boy you kissed?"

She was caught off guard as a slightly outraged noise escaped her throat. She tried not to laugh. "Mulder, I'm not thirteen anymore, seriously."

"What, I'll never meet the guy, Scully…well, I'm sure I can do a criminal check on him…"

"Chris Lanzo, I was twelve, and it was on a dare from Melissa," Scully wondered if he could see her face glowing in the dark of their car. "I really didn't like him much, he was two years older than I was, and had the worst case of acne I had ever seen."

"So why did you kiss him," Mulder sounded intrigued.

"Because Missy made me do it…she dared me to do it because he liked the both of us, but she wanted to get him to go away."

"And did he after that," the idea sounded doubtful to Mulder.

"Ironically he started high school that year, got into sports, and started dating cheerleaders. He didn't even acknowledge I was alive after that, and then we moved to Baltimore and it didn't matter." Scully still remembered the painful sting of teenaged rejection, though now over twenty years later the memory made her smile.

"It's your turn Mulder, first kiss?"

"You have to do better than that, Scully," he snorted.

"With tongue," her lips formed and impish grin. She was sure Mulder nearly snorted his sunflower seed up his nose.

"Um," he coughed for a moment, "I was fourteen, she was my cousin's, best friend's sister, and she was the only girl we knew who had large breasts and was willing to let us feel them up." He sounded slightly embarrassed to be admitting this. "And she was the one slipping tongues into people's mouths, I just happened to have an open one."

"Mouth," Scully teased.

"Um…yeah," he chuckled. "Never knew what ever happened to her."

"Don't tell me her name was Bambi."

"No, Amber."

"Seriously?"

"Apparently her parents expected great things."

Scully shook her head, "Mulder, how do you get yourself in these messes?"

"Very carefully, I can assure you. My turn again."

"Dear lord," she breathed.

"So what were you telling Eddie van Blount that night I busted in on you about to plant one on someone with my face?" He had never brought up that night in the year and a half since it happened. Scully mentally groaned.

"I remember telling him about Marcus, my high school boyfriend," he had been a baseball player, quite handsome, and smart, like herself. He was essentially all the things her father wanted in a boyfriend for her, and none of the things that Scully wanted in her life past the age of nineteen."

"You dated a guy named Marcus," Mulder sounded slightly disgusted. "Did he have a BMW or a Mercedes in high school?"

"Neither, a beat up Toyota, which then nearly burned on Prom night," she laughed, remembering her best friend Sylvia's horrified face. "My father was so angry I was out in the woods alone with a boy, good Catholic girls didn't do that."

"I take it Marcus didn't get any that Prom," he tossed another sunflower seed shell out of the window with a particular vehemence.

"Well not out in the backwoods of Maryland, he didn't," she wasn't going to admit to Mulder that she actually did finally succumb to teenaged hormones a week before graduation when Marcus, via Sylvia's gentle coaching, had convinced her that she couldn't go off to college a virgin, it just wasn't respectable. Her first sexual experience was anything but romantic.

"Does this make it my turn," Mulder was caught in what looked like a particularly difficult seed to crack, and she took her advantage to change the subject. He nodded his head in assent as she heard the satisfying crack of the shell.

"What in the hell did you see in Phoebe Green," she had been dying to ask that for the last six years.

"Phoebe," he sounded surprised she brought her up.

"I've never see a woman lay that sort of fearful whammy on you," not even Fowley, Scully admitted grudgingly. "One minute you are preaching about how evil she is, the next you are holding her close and becoming passionate on duty."

"Is that a serious infraction in the code of conduct?"

"Mulder," she rolled her eyes.

"No, just saying," he shrugged uncomfortably beside her. "Phoebe was like fire, she looked all warm and inviting, and you wanted to get near her, to touch her, to have her consume you. But what you don't realize about fire is that it follows its nature, it consumes you whole, till there is nothing but ash, and then leaves you blackened and burnt while it moves on to its next victim." His laugh was bittersweet. "Phoebe certainly made my time at Oxford very memorable indeed."

"How did it end between you two?"

"Which of the many times," he reached for another seed. "The last time was when she and I had spent the entire night before making plans…serious plans. Plans about us, our future, I knew the FBI was interested even then, they had been reaching out to me through friends of my Dad," he snorted ironically. "I didn't know then what I know now about my Dad's friends and just what they were up to with me. I thought it would be a great chance for the two of us. Phoebe could get some consulate work, I was planning on asking Dad to pull some strings, perhaps get her on through the State Department, and she would have been great at it. She had about as keen a grasp on the criminal mind as I did." He didn't say the last statement to be ironic, but Scully thought it was all the same.

"Was she happy with the idea?" Scully thought she knew the answer to this one, but asked anyway.

"Well, she was that night. She said it was a plan, we'd graduate, blah, blah, you know the spiel."

"So what happened?"

"The next morning I found her in the arms of someone else."

"Oh," she didn't know if she should sound surprised or not. Somehow, the revelation didn't terribly shock her.

"Yeah, well so was I…she was sleeping with my tutor."

"Tutor…isn't that like your academic advisor?"

"Something like that," Mulder nodded, sighing. "He threatened all sorts of hell if I told anyone he was caught with a student, and I threatened all sorts of hell for him fucking my girlfriend. We ended it as peaceably as men could?"

"Who ended up with the black eye," somehow with two brothers, she knew that was coming."

"He did, I played way too much sandbox baseball as a kid, I cracked him right across the cheek." It was years later and Mulder didn't sound terribly repentant. "I still managed to pass my exams first class. Couldn't let my parents come to my graduation for nothing."

"And Phoebe," Scully wondered where she ended up in all of this.

"I didn't bother talking to her. I managed to get out of the country with Mom without saying a word. She didn't even bother to contact me again for three years, and that was only because she was in town with her latest boy toy, some new member of the British consulate. She didn't stay long, she liked her new job at Scotland Yard too well."

"Ever wonder what happened to her," Scully hadn't heard about the woman in years.

"I don't know, perhaps she busy fixing her broomstick," Mulder didn't sound like he really meant that. "Though, I have to admit, the sex was pretty mind blowing."

"I bet," Scully suddenly felt her mouth go dry with irritation.

"We had sex on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's grave once," he threw out randomly. "I think half of the fun was we were sure we'd get caught."

"Mulder," Scully was horrified.

"What, weren't you the one who was going to have it out with Marcus out in the great outdoors?"

"Yeah, but not on top of someone's mortal remains," she frowned at him, knowing he couldn't really see her gaze that well in the dark "What if someone had seen you?"

"I'd have a great story to tell my grandchildren," she could almost see the evil grin. He was incorrigible.

"My turn," Mulder's voice was singsong gleeful. "What was the worst relationship prim and proper Dana Scully ever got into. You have to tell me the biggest, worst mistake you ever made. And it can't be that Ethan guy you were with when I met you, that wasn't serious."

"Ethan was too serious." Well, as serious as Scully got at the time. Still, even she had to admit that she still didn't understand why she had the fling with the dreamy photographer.

"Fess up…don't tell me it was Willis, he was a good man."

"No, it wasn't Jack," she still felt pang whenever Jack's name was brought up, and still clearly remembered sitting there, tied up in a ramshackle house to a radiator pipe, watching as her Jack, the one she remembered, slowly faded in front of her eyes.

"No, not Jack, though my father was horrified I was dating a man nearly his age. He never knew about Daniel." She couldn't believe she was even admitting this out loud. "Dr. Waterston was my mentor at Stanford, when I was in residency he was my boss. And eventually, he and I began seeing each other outside of work hours."

"What is with you and these work relationships with older men, Scully," Mulder sounded a bit put out. "I see I have no chance unless I put gray in my hair and age twenty years."

She snorted at the idea, "Fat chance, Mulder. Believe me, between Daniel and Willis, I learned all the lessons I needed to on the story of workplace relationships."

"So what was up with Dr. Dan then," Mulder continued.

"Nothing…I mean he was brilliant, one of the top heart specialists in the country, he still is as a matter of fact." She smiled wistfully out at the quiet, sleeping neighborhood outside of their car. "I wanted to be near him, to just share in half of the knowledge he had. And he was willing to let me do it. I think in his own way he enjoyed the admiration, the attention from a young student. Perhaps he was looking for that in his life."

"What ever happened then," though by the tone of Mulder's voice, she suspected he had already divined the answer.

"I found out he was married," Scully stated the facts as calmly as if she were reciting an autopsy report. "I called him one day at his office, and a woman answered. When I asked where he was, she stated she was his wife, and that he was going out to dinner with herself and his daughter." She still felt the stinging embarrassment and shock of that moment. "I got her off with some comment about being one of his students looking for him for some academic advice, and I think at the time she bought it. I was horrified…I mean, I had no intention of being the 'other woman' as it were, but when I confronted him, he didn't deny it."

"It's funny, it was that moment, that exact moment when I began to look at my life differently. Until then, I was just happy to live in the shade of male figures, my father, Daniel, others. I was willing to marry Daniel, to settle down with him, start a family, and have a quiet practice while he had a great and illustrious career as a surgeon. And the moment I found out the truth…it all changed."

"You decided to leave medicine for the FBI after that," Mulder filled in for her. "Though you had been intrigued by the idea for several months, ever since an FBI recruiter contacted you. A part of you has always wanted to live up to the heroic ideals you have of your father, and you've envied your brother's ability to follow in his footsteps. But your father always wanted you to be in a line a bit more safe and secure, hence medical school. The FBI was your way to break out, to do what you wanted on your terms, and still live up to the expectations you had set for yourself based on your worship of your father."

Scully blinked blankly at Mulder. She could see him smile in profile. "I was and am a criminal profiler, Scully, and it doesn't take much to read you. Dr. Daniel was only the push you needed to find the path that you are on now. You wanted to go that way for a long time, else you would have stayed despite the fact that you discovered he had a family, and you would have tried to work something out."

"Maybe," Scully wasn't terribly certain of this. "I don't know, I just…I loved him then."

"And now?"

"Mulder, it's been years, and I haven't seen him since I left Stanford. I suppose he's either still happily married, or shacked up with another young med student who was duped by his charming smile and his charismatic demeanor." Still, she thought vaguely, she did wonder where he was.

"So, you found out tonight I nearly married a nymphomaniac with a fetish for famous dead people's graves, and I discovered you were a home wrecker with an abnormal fixation on dating your older, attractive, highly gifted and intelligent co-workers." His voice lowered suggestively. "You know, Scully, I am older than you by three years."

"Only physically, Mulder." She rolled her eyes.

"Ouch," again there was a crack from between his teeth, and another seed went flying. "I suppose all of us have youthful indiscretions, things we look back on and wonder why we did."

"Would you change any of it," Scully asked quietly. She saw Mulder shake his head slowly.

"No, not really," he mused, "after all, it led me to my search. And more important, it led me to you."

"Though," he admitted wickedly. "I might have not done the Doyle's grave bit, I had a rash in a very embarrassing place for weeks."

Scully covered her face, and wondered how much longer they had on this stake out.


End file.
